Dear Customers

This is to announce that Chicken Town Ltd.’s last day of trading will be Friday the 22nd December 2017. Our last public event at the Old Fire Station on Tottenham Green will be on Christmas Day, our third free annual lunch for local people and families facing hardship.

Chicken Town has traded for just over two years, from October 2015. In this time we have come to know our neighbours, local businesses and many regular customers, and we feel very grateful for the relationships we have built with local schools, community groups and the individuals and families who have visited us. We have served over 30,000 customers, thousands of local young people have benefitted from subsidised and free food, we’ve worked with 1,300 young people through our youth programme and trained and employed over 30 brilliant members of staff. We are very pleased to say there will be no job losses for these members of staff as a result of this announcement.

It was always Chicken Town’s central goal to become financially independent, while serving delicious and healthy food to young people. Due to economic pressures – many of which are shared by other social enterprises and small businesses – this has not been possible. As you may know, we have been working to achieve a smooth transition to a new restaurant partner over the past six months.From Spring 2018 and subject to final lease negotiations, we are excited to announce that the restaurant at the Old Fire Station will become home to a new food and hospitality business, operated by the experienced restaurateurs behind Bethnal Green’s Bistrotheque and led by Pablo Flack who lives locally in Tottenham. The menu will be accessibly-priced with a broad appeal and more details will be announced in the run up to opening.

Pablo’s team will take on the responsibility for repaying the existing loan of £210k provided to Chicken Town from the Opportunity Investment Fund – a £3.65m programme jointly provided by the GLA and Haringey Council to enable investment in workspace and employment projects in Tottenham. This is a transfer of the loan provided to Chicken Town in 2015 to convert the ground floor site at the Old Fire Station into a restaurant space. Under the terms of the loan agreement the new operators will continue to deliver new jobs and training to local residents, and they have already offered ongoing employment and training opportunities to all of our valued staff, which we are delighted about.

We are also happy to say that the new restaurant will continue to support the ongoing programme of healthy eating projects that has been established over the past two years.Working alongside local schools and organisations, and with further support from the Charity Create London, we will continue to encourage access to healthier eating for children and families in Tottenham.

Over the past two years, 8 local schools and a range of organisations have taken part in growing projects, cookery classes and a range of creative and educational activity. This work will continue. We hope that other restaurants and food providers can learn from what we have achieved and we will be happy to talk about our experience.

We would like to sincerely thank our many customers, supporters, partners, friends, families and the young people we have loved working with over the past two years.

We have a full drinks menu including Beavertown Beer, Tottenham Hopspur, Cider, Wine, Spirits and lots of Soft drinks.

Theres also a full desert menu with our speciality brownie made by our chef Sam, ice cream from our friends at Ice Cream Union, and even a banana split!

If you love fried chicken – and we know you do – you’ll love our Junior Special menu. Don’t listen to people who tell you healthy choices are always expensive and fried chicken is always bad for you. Come to Chicken Town between 3.30 and 6.30 pm, Tuesday to Thursdays, and 12.00 to 6.30 pm on Fridays and get Tottenham’s best fried chicken at these prices:

For just £2 you can get our Junior Spesh: 2 chicken pieces and 2 sides (choose from fries, sweet potato wedges, onion rings, greens, lettuce, coleslaw, and our very own homemade baked beans).

If you’re feeling a little more flush, for £2.50 try our Wing Deal: 3 chicken wings, plus fries and a can of soft drink.

And if you’re really in the money, splash out on our Strip Burger:A chicken fillet burger and fries for just £3.50.

All our Junior Special food is cooked in the same way as the chicken on our main menu. That means high-quality, free-range meat, steamed and flash-fried to make it juicy inside and crispy outside, but without the bad fats, high salt and high sugar that make a lot of fried chicken a nutritional no-no.

How do we make the Junior Special meals good value as well as good for you? You’ll see that our main menu is pricier than the Junior Special: we use the profits we earn on the main meals to make the Junior meals cheaper.

Chicken Town

Chicken Town is a not-for-profit, social-enterprise restaurant. We set it up to offer a healthy fast-food alternative in the Tottenham area, serving high quality food that is particularly affordable for young people it while also providing work and training opportunities for the local community.

Making healthy fried chicken available

There’s a reason fried chicken is so popular: it’s tasty and satisfying, and doesn’t break the bank. However, studies show that eaten in large quantities and too regularly, it can lead to high levels of obesity and ill health – particularly in children and young people.

Chicken Town’s aim is to provide food that tastes good and is nutritious and healthy. The secret to our fried chicken is in the way we choose and cook our meat. All our birds are herb-fed, free-range chickens from Swaledale in the Yorkshire Dales – we think they taste much better than battery-farmed animals. To create the succulent chicken morsels with a crisp coating that everyone loves, we gently steam the meat before marinating it in buttermilk, covering it in a Panko crumb, and flash-frying it in rapeseed oil.

The reason this great food doesn’t hurt your pocket is because of the way we run our business. Chicken Town is a social enterprise, which means that we use what we earn to keep our prices down and benefit our local community.

Tasty, healthy chicken for young people in our area

It’s well known that fried chicken is cheap, easy and convenient to eat for lunch or on the way home from school. With healthier food usually pricier or simply not available, and with more than 30 chicken shops in our patch of London alone, it’s no surprise that young people choose fried chicken.

We offer young people a healthier alternative – at the same price and without sacrificing taste and satisfaction. We can do this because we use some of the profits we earn from our main menu to make the prices of our Junior Special meals match those at other chicken shops. For example, on weekday afternoons, we charge just £2 for 2 chicken pieces and 2 sides.

Opportunities and work

Apart from serving tasty, healthy food, Chicken Town also offers training and work experience to local people.

If you’re looking for a career in the hospitality industry, we’ll train and mentor you, and provide you with all the experience and advice you’ll need to become a catering professional. While you’re working with us, we’ll pay you well – at least at London living wage – and help you gain the right qualifications. We also run a restaurant partner programme, which means that, when you’re ready to move on from Chicken Town and find new challenges, you’ll have access to positions in some of the best restaurants in London.

We are often looking for new people to join our team. Please email hello@chicken-town.co.uk if you are interested.

Looking after the environment

At Chicken Town we believe we can offer healthy, delicious food at the same time as limiting our environmental impact, and that means taking care of our local surroundings as well as the wider global environment. We do this by buying the best produce we can find as locally as we can, aiming to minimise waste and food miles, and avoid excess packaging.

The intensively farmed meat used in many fast foods is a massive draw on the planet’s already scarce resources, so we make sure all our chicken comes from high-welfare, free-range animals. We try to respect the birds we eat as well as the people we serve our food to. So we’re always happy to discuss both animal welfare and healthy eating.